


i just weighed my heart, it's about thirty kilos

by mockturtletale



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Angst, BFFs, Bad Parenting, Childhood Friends, Gen, Heartbreak, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Kid Fic, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-13 07:35:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16013282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: jongin is six years old when he learns that people are as different on the inside as they are on the outside.jongin is ten years old when he realizes that if you asked everyone in the whole wide world, some of them would say that this is a bad thing.jongin is eleven years old when he starts to think that maybe those people are right, just not in the way they think they are.jongin is thirteen years old when his heart breaks for the first time.





	i just weighed my heart, it's about thirty kilos

**Author's Note:**

> this is for jay, twitter user 'wingstogravity,' who prompted it like almost a year ago.
> 
> obviously i haven't been actively posting work here this year even though i have still been active in kpop fandom this entire time (@hwifighting) and that's because writing has just been impossible for what seems like forever now. 
> 
> that said, i just wrote this in like an hour so maybe i'm just letting my demons win. 
> 
> this is the pre-slash prequel to a much lengthier fic i've already started writing, which picks up right where this one leaves off but the themes between the two are going to be so different that it felt right to post them separately and both will be able to be read as standalone. 
> 
> essentially this is the "childhood bffs heartbreak" portion that comes before the "disaster gays in college" bit. 
> 
> uh ENJOY? 
> 
>  
> 
> :D?

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

 

 

 

jongin is six years old when he learns that people are as different on the inside as they are on the outside. 

jongin is ten years old when he realizes that if you asked everyone in the whole wide world, some of them would say that this is a bad thing. 

jongin is eleven years old when he starts to think that maybe those people are right, just not in the way they think they are. 

jongin is thirteen years old when his heart breaks for the first time. 

 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

 

“my best friend is hui. our birthdays are close together and he always gives me nice gifts. he lets me pick my favourite colour when we play race cars.” hyojong stops reading and looks to their teacher for permission to go back to his seat. 

jongin worries that hyojong is going to get in trouble, but their teacher only pats him on the head as he passes her desk and calls seulgi up front to go next. 

seulgi’s report is longer than hyojong’s, but only by a sentence or two and jongin frowns, peering around at the classmates closest to him as best he can from under bangs that needed trimming two weeks ago, if his mother had had her way. 

not only is everyone else’s homework shorter than his, but for some reason they all seem to have written about what they like about their best friend, not why they like those things. 

when he’s called, jongin carries his entire notebook up front, keeping the sheaf of pages he’d yanked out to write on hidden in the middle in case his teacher sees and makes him read them all out loud. he was happy with his assignment when he’d finished it but now he wonders if he did it wrong and why his father didn’t tell him so when they’d checked it together. 

thinking on his feet, jongin makes his work read like everyone else’s by picking out just the start of most of his sentences and skipping the parts where he talks about his feelings. he says some things he likes about chanyeol and he doesn’t say anything at all about why those things make him feel a kind of way that doesn’t feel like ‘like.’

his teacher smiles at him when he’s done and just before he turns to sit back down into his seat he sees chanyeol grinning at him from the back of the classroom, sticking out like a sore thumb not because he’s almost a full head taller than the rest of their class, but because he smiles with his mouth and his eyes and his nose and his cheeks and even his glasses, somehow. 

jongin gets full marks on his homework even though his teacher only got to hear a little bit of it but when he thinks about the way his chest and belly felt full right up to the top when he’d seen chanyeol’s reaction, he thinks maybe he didn’t understand the assignment. 

chanyeol is called last and he flicks the back of jongin’s neck on his way past. when he gets to the front, chanyeol drops a bunch of pages and his face gets red when a couple of kids laugh, but he stays looking at the sheets until he’s shuffled them back into the right order. there isn’t enough time for chanyeol to finish reading before they have to stop for lunch, but teacher just laughs in a way that doesn’t sound mean and holds her hand out for the pages chanyeol didn’t get to. 

chanyeol goes back to his seat but appears right back at jongin’s side about twenty seconds later with his lunchbox in one hand, dragging his chair behind him with the other. 

seunghyun, one of the kids who had laughed when he’d dropped his work, asks chanyeol for one of his rice balls and chanyeol hands it over, _still_ smiling. 

jongin learns a lot about people that day. 

he also accidentally steps on the back of seunghyun’s shoe when they’re going home for the day, which is weird because jongin’s mom has always said he was born with a skeleton that didn’t know how to be clumsy. 

 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

 

jongin doesn’t remember and chanyeol says he doesn’t either, but their moms say that chanyeol’s dad was there for a while when they were little. there’s pictures of all six of them together out in front of the playground, two squishy faced bundles held next to each other in the middle so it must be true. 

those pictures always make jongin laugh and chanyeol scowl, which only makes it funnier to jongin because that’s exactly how it is in the pictures - jongin’s face still kinda red and squished because he was just born, chanyeol’s face screwed up in not at all concealed displeasure because he was already almost two years old and way too old for this shit if his expression was to be taken as any indication. 

these days, jongin thinks the only time chanyeol and his dad look anything alike is when is dad is frowning just like chanyeol did in those photos. 

chanyeol’s dad showed up when they were about to start first grade and everyone remembers that. 

before he came, chanyeol spent almost all his time with jongin’s family and his mom just joined them when she got back from work. 

but once he was around, jongin had to go all the way next door to see chanyeol and when once or twice jongin has to spend the night, chanyeol’s dad frowned real hard every time chanyeol’s mom tucked them both into chanyeol’s bed, jongin small enough that chanyeol whispered once that having jongin there was just like having a teddy bear that wriggled too much. 

chanyeol is about to turn twelve when his dad decides that they’re too old now to share a bed and chanyeol’s mom frowns, but not as hard as her husband does and jongin is glad when she doesn’t say anything because he’s heard them fighting through the walls and he hates how quiet chanyeol is the after those nights. 

jongin only ever sees chanyeol’s mom frown as hard and as mean as her husband one time and it’s when he looks over at jongin and chanyeol sitting on the couch, legs tangled together like always and says an english word that starts with a very hard g. 

they don’t talk about it, but jongin knows that chanyeol gets sharper as he grows bigger in more ways than just one. he loses weight as he stretches up and his father starts scolding his mother for letting him have snacks, but hard, sharp edges start to show up in his words, between his sentences and sometimes he sounds just like his father, when before he only ever sounded like his mother. 

abruptly one day, when chanyeol refuses the chocolate that jongin’s mother gives them to share while they do homework, jongin realizes that chanyeol thinks he has to change to be like his father thinks he should. 

the full bar of chocolate sits too heavy and sickly sweet in his stomach when he realizes that this is because chanyeol’s father didn’t like the way chanyeol already was. 

 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

 

when jongin is eleven and chanyeol has been twelve for forever already, chanyeol’s dad goes away again. 

they’re walking back home from the arcade when they see him outside a school that isn’t theirs, picking up a girl much smaller than even jongin and twirling her in the air when she runs into his arms. 

neither of them say anything, but chanyeol makes a sound that jongin _hates_ and then he starts to walk again, so much faster than he had been before. for once jongin doesn’t say anything when he has to run to catch up with chanyeol’s big, big strides, just touches his knuckles to the back of chanyeol’s hand and almost pretends it’s by accident. eventually they turn into the alley that leads up to their block of apartments and even though he’s started shrugging jongin off when “people can see,” chanyeol grabs for jongin’s hand right then and holds it tight as they walk by people coming home from work, people going out to the cart bar or into the city. 

“he’s the one that’s bad inside. he’s the one that should try to be different,” jongin says, late that night and with the covers pulled up so he and chanyeol are hidden here inside his bed and everyone and everything else is out there and far away.

chanyeol doesn’t say anything back, but the damp patch on jongin’s shoulder doesn’t get any bigger after that and when they sit down for breakfast the next morning chanyeol’s mother is already at the table, sitting exactly where she used to. 

lots of things change after that. 

chanyeol keeps growing, but whenever jongin looks at him it just seems like he’s getting bigger, not sharp anymore. he’s different, but only because he’s more and more and more of all that he he was before, not trying to stick together an inside and an outside that always seemed at war, anymore. 

 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

 

jongin is old enough to know that he’s acting like a baby but still young enough to not be able to help it, not really, when his tears and his nose are both running all over his face.

he’s thirteen and his best friend is moving to the other side of the country because his mom lost her job and says she needs to move nearer to her family to start looking for another one. 

jongin’s mom seems as sad about it as jongin is, so he doesn’t understand why she shakes her head when he asks why chanyeol and his mom can’t move in with them, why they can’t be her family. 

“I know it feels like it, but chanyeol isn’t family, not really,” she says into his hair because that’s all she can reach when he’s curled up in a ball between the end of his bed and his bookshelf. 

he used to hide here just so chanyeol would have to yell and try to pull him out by his ankles, his shoulders already too big to fit like jongin’s did when he was only ten. 

jongin would laugh and laugh and laugh but now he’s crying and he can’t seem to stop. 

chanyeol has never even met these people who get to live with him now and jongin still just doesn’t understand. 

“maybe they’re your mom’s family, but how can they be yours when you don’t know what they look like? you could stay here, you have to ask. you could live with us, we could be your family,” jongin pleads, but he knows what chanyeol is going to say even before he opens his mouth, because they’ve been best friends since the day that jongin was born (‘finally’, chanyeol always adds, sighing like the year and two months he’d already been alive by then was spent in anguish, waiting for jongin to show up) and he knows what it means when chanyeol’s face gets small and twisted like his father’s always did. 

“we’re not family,” chanyeol says and those knife-like edges are unearthed again, springing up between his words like they’ve been waiting below the surface all this time. 

“i don’t want to be your brother,” chanyeol says and then jongin doesn’t hear anything else because he’s kicking out with his feet just like chanyeol did with his words and jongin’s mom is helping chanyeol up off the floor and leading him away with a hand on his shoulder. 

the day he goes, jongin stays by the window in his room all day long. the view looks down onto the parking lot out front, but jongin looks up at the sky for so long and so hard that his face is swollen and wet with tears when he finally falls asleep right there leaning on the windowsill. 

after that, it feels like every breath he takes brings glass into his lungs. for days and then weeks and then months it hurts so much that he doesn’t know how the pain of chanyeol leaving doesn’t kill him. 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

when jongin is nineteen years old he starts college and on his very first day of classes, he bumps into someone tall and big across the chest, big everywhere if the huge hands that keep him on his feet are any indication. 

jongin is nineteen years old when he looks up into chanyeol’s face and this time when he asks himself how the ache under his ribs didn’t kill him when it moved into his chest at thirteen years old, he laughs at his own stupidity. 

because, he realizes, looking into chanyeol’s wide and brutally familiar eyes, it did. 

 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ 

 

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/

**Author's Note:**

> no harm is intended by this work and it's not profittable in any way, shape or form. mostly the opposite, actually. this is a fictional representation of real people and none of it should be taken to be at all true. 
> 
> title from a rich brian song, for the sake of irony. 
> 
> s/o to a and k for the speedy as ever betas. 
> 
> s/o to gracie for being a hypebeast of love and light in my life.


End file.
